I’ve always been excited by using our knowledge of how our brains work to create better marketing, advertising, and sales strategies. That led me to write Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011) as well as my blog Neuromarketing. I always emphasize practical applications, not theory. I’m the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and I co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where I served as VP Digital Marketing and continue in a consulting role. I’ve spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm, and before that directed corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. You can learn more about me and my speaking at RogerDooley.com. Follow me on Twitter at @rogerdooley, or on Google Plus at Roger Dooley.

Never Redesign Your Website Again - Really!

How many times has this scenario played out? The company website, launched with great fanfare a few years earlier, is starting to look dated. The layout looks like early 2005, and the home page, once the subject of massive battles for real estate, is a confusing mess. A few of the photos show people who no longer even work for the company, and multiple departments are complaining they aren’t getting the results they need.

So, a design firm is hired, and many heated meetings and design iterations later, a fresh, modern-looking website is launched. Everyone breathes a big sigh of relief and goes back to business as usual… until the next big redesign.

This is how many, if not most, businesses do it, and according to conversion expert Chris Goward, it’s all wrong.

Why? Goward, the founder of conversion optimization firm WiderFunnel and author of You Should Test That, explains that website designs that are the products of committees are almost certain to be far from optimal in achieving business objectives – sales, leads, etc.

It’s not just the “committee effect,” long a bane of creative and effective marketing efforts. It’s that even smart people can’t always predict what design, headline, or copy will perform best.

Evolution, Not Revolution Who’s the savviest marketer on the Web? My vote would go to Amazon.com, the biggest ecommerce firm by far. When was the last time Amazon launched a major website redesign? I have no idea, but their pages look to me about the same as they did five or ten years ago. Of course, they aren’t actually the same – many changes have occurred over the years.

In my podcast with Goward, I asked him about the “periodic redesign” approach. He commented,

It’s one of the biggest problems I find with companies today and it’s an antiquated process, the whole website redesign thing. That’s the “throw the baby out with the bathwater” approach. Part of my experience comes from the old days when I started in ad agencies and I saw what a terrible job most agencies were doing for their clients online at the time, trying to recreate a TV experience with Flash websites, and so on.

Ten years later not much has changed, there are still agencies out there producing terrible customer experiences by trying to create big idea concepts. That’s how WiderFunnel started, to create something different… thinking about how to measure the improvement that we could make on a continuous basis.

I think that website redesign is the next thing that’s going to fall, because there are so many risks in redesigning a website and doing the traditional “flip the switch” method of switching over to the new design.

Companies are creating thousands and thousands of changes when they do this “flip the switch” method, and they have no idea what impact each of those individual change is having on their end result, their conversion rate, their revenue, their lead generation, or whatever their goal is for their business.

They’re changing their headlines, their imagery, their call to action, their information, all this stuff all at once without any insight into what’s happening. [Edited for readability – listen to the podcast or read the transcript at Episode 13 – Conversion Optimization with Chris Goward.]

What Chris recommends instead of a single massive redesign is an incremental approach to changes, where each element of a change can be tested to determine its effect on results.

Of course, if a big design change is essential, even that can be tested against the current design to ensure that the business outcomes will actually improve.

Are you still seeing the sites you work with making sweeping, untested changes? Or are you seeing more of the evolutionary, testing-based approach? Share your thoughts in a comment.

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